Minutes of the MB-NG operational meeting Date: 09 July 2003 Time: 14:30 am Location:UCL Pearson lab Tel: 020 7679 7029 Video-Conf details: Gatekeeper: 193.60.253.29 Port_no: 1719 Conference no: *301234 Present: F. Saka, A. Di Donato, M. Rio. N. Pezzi, J. Orellana, P. Clarke, P. Bright-Thomas. Via Video-conf: S. Dallison, R. Hughes-Jones, D. Rogerson SLAs, Policies, classification and policing =========================================== 4.9 28/02/03 Policies, classification and policing: A draft report has been written by M. Rio. Efforts should be made to meet once a week with S. Bhatti until this task is complete. 07/03/03 No progress. Saleem was ill this week. 21/03/03 A draft has been sent to UKERNA (M. Allenby). ACTION: M. Allenby will look at it with C. Cooper next week. and also ask for his availability for a meeting with UCL people. 11/04/03 The proposal is to write two documents. One on general requirements and another on specific implementations and configuration. The current document follows the GEANT EF class definition. ACTION: M. Rio to send a mail to the people concerned to propose a face-to-face meeting to discuss these issues. 09/05/03 Setting up face-to-face meeting ongoing. It should include R. Tasker, M. Allenby, M. Rio and C. Cooper. C. Cooper has produced a draft document for UKERNA's internal QoS program. This will be made available when it is finished. 23/05/03 M. Allenby is still trying to get a date when both C. Cooper and R. Tasker are available. M. Allenby will also ask C. Cooper if it is OK to disseminate his draft policy document to MB-NG. 13/06/03 Action: M. Rio will send a mail to C. Cooper, R. Tasker, D. Rogerson to set up the meeting. 27/06/03 D. Rogerson will take the token for making this happen. 09/07/03 No progress. Task 9: Managed bandwidth service -------- 01/11/02 On hold until network is in place. 21/03/03 M. Allenby will talk to Chris Cooper on this. 11/04/03 Ongoing. M. Allenby will produce something will be produced by the end of May. 23/05/03 Ongoing. 13/06/03 Ongoing. D. Rogerson has taken over M. Allenby's role on MB-NG. M. Allenby will send his document to D. Rogerson to distribute. 27/06/03 The managed bandwidth document is currently with R. Samani. D. Rogerson will get hold of this document and distribute it. 09/07/03 Ongoing. Status of testbeb ================= 09/05/03 At UCL, the new GE-WAN ports of the 7600 routers are not communicating. At Manchester they have managed to send traffic between a GE-WAN port and a GE Catalyst port. This may be due to the layer 2 auto-negotiation. N. Pezzi will check it this afternoon. 23/05/03 The IOS we are running is experimental, but required to make QoS work. After contacting Cisco, we have been advised to wait until the official release of the official IOS 13/05/03 Two GE-WAN ports on one of the Enhanced version 2 line cards at UCL are not working using the new production IOS. ACTION: All other sites should check to make sure there are no problems with the ports on their line cards. 27/06/03 Manchester id O.K. but at RAL, one of the line cards is displaying the same symptoms as the UCL line card. Two of the GE-WAN ports do not seem to work. Logical have been notified. We are expecting replacement cards. 09/03/03 No progress. 23/05/03 The RAL-Reading link is still in loopback. A date is being arranged for a Logical engineer to go to RAL to harvest memory on old OC-48 long-reach and transplant it to the new OC-48 long-reach. The attenuators are in place. The 7600s will be configured next week. 13/06/03 C. Seeling is working on configuring the RAL equipment. R. Tasker will contact C. Seelig to find out the progress. 27/06/03 As mentioned above two of the ports on the GE-WAN line card are not working. Currently the OSRs and firewall have been connected to the MB-NG networks and are accessible remotely. Two of the three PCs have been installed, but are not yet accessible remotely (requires NIC drivers). The last PC has a fault. Possibly with the power supply. 09/07/03 Boston have been notified about the faulty PC. ACTION: N. Pezzi to send the RAL IP addresses to Manchester. 21/03/03 MPLS configuration over the production network for conducting tests between UCL and INFN through CERN should be taken as a separate issue. 09/05/03 Setting up MPLS from UCL to INFN through CERN should be discussed with Ian Bridge. 09/05/03 Christina Vitoli (INFN) is producing a document on setting up MPLS. We will use this document to help us configure MPLS in MB-NG and also between UCL and CERN. 09/07/03 Since we have managed to get MPLS working on the 7200 and 7600s, we will no longer be pursuing this. 09/05/03 MPLS: Dynamic may not be straight forward. Static may be feasible. Rina Samani is working on the rules for accessing the GSRs. She is currently on holiday. ACTION: Mike Allenby will talk Jeremy Sharp on this issue. ACTION: Ask Jonathan Couzens if he has example MPLS configurations. 13/06/03 On MPLS, there are problems classifying which traffic flow should go in the tunnel and which one go through the normal IP path. We have an example MPLS configuration from N. Carter which we are trying out. 27/06/03 MPLS is now working on the 7200 after an IOS upgrade from 12.2(12.9)T to 12.2(15)T2. The next step is to try it on the MB-NG network. 09/07/03 Ongoing. 23/05/03 Direct access to the core GSRs for MPLS, QoS setup and SNMP data should be possible. We do not know when yet. 13/06/03 D. Rogerson will be contacted about getting the GSR passwords. N. Pezzi will talk to D. Rogerson on using MPLS for traffic engineering and VPN and possible use for the managed bandwidth service. 27/06/03 J Couzens is on Holiday from next week, so D. Rogerson will try to talk to him today about getting the passwords for the GSRs. If D. Rogerson is unable to get the password today, he will try and sort it out himself next week. At the very latest, we expect the password by the 1st July. 09/07/03 Done. Task 7: e2e Network equipment configuration -------- 11/04/03 Returning Other loan equipment: Manchester can return their loan 7200. At UCL, we would like to keep the 7200 for work on the middleware and MPLS through the production network. 13/06/03 Manchester will send their loan equipment off today. 09/05/03 Harvey Lang of Cisco has forwarded this request to Mike Mckeown. 23/05/03 We will push Cisco on this issue. Manchester are retuning their loan 7200. 27/06/03 Manchester have returned their GSR. M. Mckeown has been contacted regarding keeping the 7200. We are awaiting his response. 09/07/03 Ongoing. Experiments ============ Task 8: QoS Experimental measurements -------- 13/12/02 ACTION: A schedule of tests should be drawn up (Generic test plan for verifying functionality on network). Ongoing. 14/02/03 This action is postponed until the March report is finished. It also depends on the available equipment. 23/05/03 Experiments should include TCP over QoS BABAR (HEP application) Reality Grid (Non HEP application) Spirent would like us to test their QoS conformance test suite. We should look at it, but we should not spend too much time on it. Spirent would also like: Reports on our tests. A mention in publications and at network workshops. Any TCL scripts developed for tests. For MB-NG's use of Spirent equipment to be presented to Internet 2 Booking Cisco's Bendfont lakes for standalone tests. This will be interesting after the completion of the project report. We need to discuss: - Equipment we require and confirmation of availability - Plan of test we need to carry out (We will only have two days). - Who will be going. 07/03/03 We have proposed 1st and 2nd May 2003. We are waiting for confirmation from Cisco. 21/03/03 This date has been confirmed. We need to write the test plan. 11/04/03 The test plan will be reviewed today. 09/05/03 The Bedfont Lakes tests have been moved. New dates to be confirmed. The test plan is currently being reviewed with Nick Carter. 13/06/03 The tests will take place on Tuesday the 17th June 2003. 27/06/03 The tests have been performed. We have a better idea of how the GSR works, but we must scrutinise the results to make sure and possibly suggest more tests to confirm our understanding. 09/07/03 Results will be discussed with Nick Carter on 18/07/03. We must test the GSR's OC-48 Engine 3 "tofab" queueing. Task 11: The deployment and integration of the Middleware and APIs (GARA) -------- 04/04/03 Valentina Capaccio has setup the mailing list for GARA. http://server11.infn.it/archive-gara/ 09/05/03 Now that Valentina has left, we must find out who will maintain the GARA mailing list. 23/05/03 INFN are looking to employ someone to fill Valentina's role. 21/03/03 UCL is working with INFN to setup and debugging the latest version of GARA. Setup of the mailing list is ongoing. 11/04/03 UCL is working with INFN to try to get GARA stable in the Globus 2.2 environment. There is no plan to move to Globus 3.0 09/05/03 No progress. Leon Goomans' group (University of Amsterdam) are looking at integrating GARA with AAA. 23/05/03 Timescale for deployment of Globus 2 and GARA is given as one month. 13/06/03 No progress. Date for deployment is end of July (taking holidays into account). An outstanding question is how will FTP use GARA? 27/06/03 No progress. 09/07/03 No progress. We must discuss what effort is excluded in order to get moving on this. Task 12: High throughput programme -------- 04/04/03 The GridFTP disk-to-disk results are 520 Mbit/s compared with memory-to-memory rate at 941 Mbit/s. Manchester are investigating to improve the disk-to-disk performance. 11/04/03 Ongoing. Read/write tests to disk show a rate of 800 Mbit/s. Investigation Web100 output shows the transfers with GridFTP achieves, but does not maintain line rate during tests. HTTP file transfer program achieves 500 Mbit/s and Apache web server achieves 700 Mbit/s (Disk-to-disk). 21/03/03 Intermittent burst of receive errors have been observed (using ifconfig) on the Manchester PCs interfaces. ACTION: S. Dallison will look at combinations of kernel, drivers and interrupt coalescence values to try and mitigate the problem. 04/04/03 Ongoing. Coalesce value of 64 gives better results. 11/04/03 Ongoing. The Intel Gigabit Ethernet card is going to be changed to see if it is the problem. 09/05/03 Now all PCs at Manchester are able to receive a maximum of 950 Mbit/s. The transmission rate of the Manchester PCs are slightly lower than the UCL PCs (940 cf 950 Mbit/s). 23/05/03 In the end-of-year report, with the correct settings, 800 Mbit/s disk-to-disk was achieved with the Apache web server. With the radio astronomy software, large packet loss was observed. The conclusion is that the way the application is written is critical to the performance. 13/06/03 A Schedule of experiments are being drawn up. 27/06/03 Tests on Disk-to-disk transfers are ongoing. For GridFTP tests, a new version of Globus has been installed, but disk-to-disk is still only 500 Mbit/s as with the previous version. The main aims here are to solve the disk-to-disk issues and to run the BABAR data through MB-NG. 09/07/03 Discussion between R. Hughes-Jones, R. Tasker and BABAR to arrange the BABAR data transfer experiment are ongoing. Disk-to-disk performances are ongoing. Performance tests show 400 Mbit/s write and 1200 Mbit/s read. Back-to-back results with BBCP shows 300 Mbit/s read/write (3ware Hardware Raid 0). This issue must be discussed in a dedicated brain-storm. We must achieve 1 Gbit/s by the end of the project unless we agree that it is impossible. Applications ============ 11/04/03 Reality Grid: Arrange to meet with Reality Grid people (Stephen Pickles and John Brooke cc Peter Coveney) before collaboration meeting about running Reality Grid on the MB-NG network. 09/05/03 The Reality Grid meeting will be held on 12/05/03 at 11am. 23/05/03 Next meeting with Reality Grid on 28 May 2003. 13/06/03 A schedule and set of milestones are being drawn up. 27/06/03 A document has been produced detailing the initial Reality Grid experiment we will do through the MB-NG network. We need a fourth PC in Manchester HEP for the experiment. S. Dallison has offered one of his PCs for this. The physical aspect of this experiment are being put into place. A date has been set for a meeting on the 8th July in Manchester to do the experiment. 09/07/03 Ongoing. Robbin Pennings from MCC will help with the setup at Manchester 23/05/03 R. Tasker has an outline plan on getting BABAR data from RAL to Manchester through the MB-NG network. R. Tasker will arrange a meeting with Roger Barlow and R. Hughes-Jones. The aim is to get to start sending data by September 2003. 13/06/03 Some lab tests have already started. For the schedule document, the BABAR people must be consulted. The experiments are planned to start around October. 27/06/03 See high throughput programme. Task 3: Traffic generation and measurement (equipment provision) -------- 08/11/02 ACTION: R. Hughes-Jones to arrange meetings to discuss options and what we loose if we do not have GPS. This is a low priority. ACTION: UCL to investigate access to UCL based GPS time server (Speak to Lewis Grantham or Piers O'Hanlon). ACTION: S. Dallison to investigate the availability of a time server at Manchester. 31/01/03 Possibility of using NTS servers synchronised by the Rugby clock. The resolution must be checked. 28/02/03 Manchester have a GPS system which they are investigating (works with Windows but not yet with Linux). http://www.ripe.net/ttm/Misc/ 21/03/03 Manchester's GPS system is working under Linux. The resolution has not been tested yet. 09/05/03 Work is ongoing on at Manchester on how to calibrate and make an accurate measurement of the resolution of the RIPE GPS system. An antenna has been place on the roof of the Physics and the system is receiving a strong signal compared to a weak one when the antenna was indoors. 23/05/03 The Manchester GSP system was hacked. The software is being rebuilt. Before that it was running satisfactorily. 13/06/03 The GPS system has been rebuilt. The resolution has not been tested partly because we don't know how. 27/06/03 Ongoing. The system is installed and working. 09/07/03 Ongoing. Manchester have ordered another system for ATLAS costing £1240+VAT. 11/04/03 I. Bridge suggested we look at the Garmin hand-held GPS Garmin: GPS 16 HVS (Part No. 010-00258-03) £134.98 incl. VAT http://www.garmin.com/manuals/gps16qsg.pdf http://www.garmin.com/manuals/66.pdf ACTION: We should buy a pair and test them. 09/05/03 One has been ordered to test at UCL. 23/05/03 Ongoing. The UCL's Garmin GPS device needs a power supply. 13/06/03 Ongoing. The power supply has been made thanks to Mathew Warren at UCL. We are now looking at where to locate it. 27/06/03 Ongoing. 09/07/03 Ongoing. Task 10: Plan extension of demonstrations to sites in Europe and US -------- 01/11/02 On hold until network is in place. 31/01/03 A talk on MB-NG and our use of the Spirent equipment should be given at the Internet 2 members meeting. 09/05/03 We should start planning now on extensions to Europe and US. 23/05/05 We will wait until the network is fully in place. 23/05/03 UKERNA should write value added to them in the year 1 report. AOB ===== 09/07/03 The paper for the all hands meeting has been accepted. Next meeting: 22 July 2003 (the 2nd and 4th Fridays of the month).